The problem with changing narrators of audiobooks within a series is the possibility that they won’t pronounce proper nouns consistently across books.

As much as I’m enjoying Paladin of Souls, the female narrator (which makes sense since the POV character is a woman) has a very different accent than the man who narrated The Curse of Chalion. And their pronunciation of some vowels is different. For example, “Teidez” is not pronounced the same across the two audiobooks. And the “y” sound, consistently an “ee” sound in TCoC and in most places in PoS, changes to the “i” in “ice” for the name Arhys for some reason.

Related

3 responses to “Audiobook narrators”

I know what you mean, having just finished Paladin of Souls. But I loved the narration with sparkly rainbows and butterflies.

I have only listened so I don’t know how a lot of the names/Proper nouns are spelled – so thanks for letting my know about Arhys 🙂

What bothers me more is where I’ve read the books and pronounced a word/name/noun in a particular way and the narrator says it a different way. The narrator in the David Eddings series’ Belgariad/Mallorean pronounced Belgarath “Belga-rath” instead of “Bel-Garath” and it drove me nuts. My son (who listened to the whole series) uses that pronounciation now! Grr.

so far I’ve only listened to Shards of Honor and Barrayar. I have Falling Free and the 3 other books after Barrayar on my TBL.

I listened to Chalion last year or the year before, so there was plenty of time between for me which I’m sure made it easier. The only one I really noticed was “Gortagot” (sorry i probably got the spelling wrong – I’ve not seen it written down). James pronounced it “Gorragot” with a rolling r and Reading pronounces it with a t sound.